There's a new element in the debate over U.S. income inequality, and it's one that may actually get our political leadership talking about ways to address the issue: businesses are beginning to notice that their middle-class customers have disappeared.

In a sane world, the ringing denunciation of intelligent design and creationist "science" delivered by a federal judge in 2005 would have eradicated these concepts from the schoolroom.
District Judge John E. Jones III of Harrisburg, Pa., ruled then that...

'I would rather lick a toilet seat than a cellphone' - microbiologist comes clean.
A toilet seat. Seriously.
Microbiologist David Coil writes on slate.com that bacteria exist everywhere and some are perfectly fine and actually beneficial. Including,...

The final wheeze of Obamacare news that crossed the wires in 2013 was a New Year's Eve emergency injunction granted by Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor for a group of Catholic nuns who operate nursing homes in Denver and Baltimore.
At first blush,...

One of the biggest issues looming when Congress returns from its holiday break is immigration reform. In honor of our nation built by immigrants, we give you our rich, well-sourced and huddled mass of facts yearning to breathe free:
1. A staggering...

Earlier this month a controversy arose after a tongue-in-cheek column written by Aisha Harris, a woman of color, was published online at Slate.com, suggesting maybe it’s time that Santa Claus is no longer depicted as a white man.
A Fox news host, Megyn Kelly, commenting on air about the Harris column, caused a firestorm by saying Santa is most certainly white and that Jesus is too. After many expressed outrage at Kelly’s comments, she later said that she, like Harris, had simply been...

Having taken a fair amount of heat from the science-based community for her recent show promoting scare stories about an important immunological vaccine, Katie Couric has backed off.
In a piece appearing Tuesday in the Huffington Post, the TV host conceded that some of the criticism that the segment was "too anti-vaccine and anti-science" was "valid...in retrospect." She acknowledged that "more emphasis should have been given to the safety and efficacy of the HPV vaccines." The initials stand for the...

Matthew Yglesias this week has jumped on one of the more discreditable bandwagons of Obamacare revisionism: the notion that the failure of the enrollment website, HealthCare.gov, has done near permanent damage to progressive principles.
A lot of that has been going around since the website's rotten launch Oct. 1. John Dickerson, Yglesias' stablemate at Slate.com, has said that the flub has made Republicans "look like sages."
At the New Republic, editor Franklin Foer wrote bluntly about "Obamacare's...

In all the commotion about a Miami-area police force's allegedly mindless harassment of workers and patrons of a convenience store, one aspect that may have been overlooked is how the cops' behavior was fostered by a "zero tolerance" program.
You may have heard about this case: as documented by the Miami Herald, the police in this suburb of Miami stopped and questioned one denizen of the convenience store 258 times in four years. He was arrested and jailed 56 times, typically for trespassing. The punch...

A tradition -- the president pardoning turkeys from certain death just before Thanksgiving -- has come in for an unusual amount of criticism this year. A Slate.com writer suggests President Obama pardon real people instead of (or in addition to) turkeys. The writer reports that the president has pardoned about 1 in every 290 people who have applied -- far fewer than his four predecessors. Others have pointed out that turkeys bred for the table don’t last long anyway. Is this a cute tradition, or a...

Norwegian public television (NRK), which introduced the now-legendary continuous, live log-burning show (12 hours long, with “color commentary” on the historical and cultural importance of fire), scheduled a new program for this week in its appeal to serenity (labeled “Slow TV”). On Nov. 1, NRK was to televise live, for five hours, an attempt to break the world record for producing a sweater, from shearing the sheep to spinning the wool and knitting the garment (current record: 4:...